I cannot say that I was not warned adequately, by all kinds of lovers of films, that Rakesh Mehra’s Delhi 6 was a problematic bundle of disappointments: too preachy, structurally unsound—warm and fuzzy in the first half and then a breathless barrage of events in the second, overdone, no plot, no thought. But, A. R. Rahman’s extraordinary music for the film and a few quieter voices, here and there, said not all of it was damned. So I took the plunge three months after the first phase of reactions and reviews has all but cooled. Indeed, the first half of the film is a dream sequence that discovers old Delhi and Chandni Chowk, a very aesthetically pleasing and cinematically delicious one at that but it goes beyond that. You know trouble is brewing, and not just because the backdrop to the film is the “monkey man serial killing� scare that hit the news in Delhi some time back. This “monkey man� becomes the symbolic core of the film in the second half, but that was not the real trouble I was expecting. I was getting that chill after the first half-an-hour that you get in Hindi movies when something especially happy is going on; I was expecting that cruel dramatic device which exaggerates happiness because it directly precedes a severe crisis.

The happiness at hand was the very high degree of syncretic co-existence between the Hindus and Muslims of Gali Paswan in Chandi Chowk. It is so syncretic that Mamdu the Muslim jalebi wala has an image of Mecca and Hanuman side by side hung on the walls of his little shop. And this is what the half-Hindu-half-Muslim-American-born-and-raised Abhishek Bachchan sees as he enters the world of old Delhi as the “burger chhaap� outsider, an outlier who notices other outliers in this happy world of harmony. He notices oppressions of gender, caste and class that have been normalized to the extent that the people around him don’t notice at all, or if they do, they accept it grudgingly in the name of tradition or responsibility. But who is he to speak; he is asked when he speaks out of turn. He has no legitimacy because he violates far too many categorical imperatives. He is tolerated in the system like the other marginalized characters as long as he confirms to the fundamentals of unequal power sharing and is willing to see old Delhi through the eyes of a tourist, through his cellphone camera, which is what he does in the slowly unraveling first half of the film.

Then the crisis, and the rapid action of the second part of the film where the monkey-man induced fear and insecurity bubbles over in the shape of communal tension that tears apart the happy world of Gali Paswan, but it was expected, wasn’t it? All the happy people, Hindus and Muslims alike, turn against their neighbors; all brotherly love and trust is lost and that loss is not questioned for a minute. There are the right wing politicians and the religious leaders who fuel the rioting but here is where Delhi 6 makes a point about communal rioting not often heard in the mainstream media. The film suggests that religious intolerance and rioting is not a spur of the moment reaction that politicians work up in people but that it is rooted more deeply in the cultural constructions of individuals and expressed in the daily oppressions that are normalized and upheld. In exceptional situations of fear, prejudice finds expression in the most horrific of ways and here is the hard part: everyone is capable of doing very bad things, but not so willing to admit to it. It brings us back to the monkey-man-monster- a symbol for fear, prejudice and hearsay that also ultimately becomes the scapegoat, literally, in the old Greek tragedy sense. In the micro-world of Gali Paswan the crisis needs a resolution, and who better to inhabit and externalize the furry monster but the outspoken American-Hindu-Muslim who likes to take action and make things real? The incensed Hindus and Muslims finally find a palpable third to direct their trauma and aggression on; the Abhishek in monkey costume who was only trying to save his lady love is kicked, beaten, and then shot. Aggression spent, the rioters calm down and then there is time for regret, reconciliation and perhaps reflection, or perhaps not. Chances are that this cycle will repeat itself again.

Delhi 6, as a mainstream Hindi film needs to be appreciated for the broader context that it provides for communal tension. It also needs to be appreciated for why people were so virulent in its dismissal. The film’s use of the metaphor of the mirror and its point that different kinds of social prejudices are not unconnected and that one cannot be solved while others are maintained, perhaps cuts too close to the heart. Whether or not the gender and class privileged inhabitants of Gali Paswan are wiser for the events, an alliance between the variously marginalized certainly emerges by the end of the film. The idea is that even as Gali Paswan returns to life as normal, things won’t be exactly the same.

Delhi 6 is not without its problems and the discussion can be extended further into the question of how to understand communal intolerance and violence in general. There is the liberal, good hearted, inclusive way to do it as the film does but then there are the pitfalls of unexamined liberalism, in which Delhi 6 also unfortunately finds itself. There is a way in which Hindus and Muslims are held “equally� accountable in a rioting situation where the discourse then becomes one of retaliation and revenge. Most mainstream media shy away from pointing out that there is usually no easy equality in a majority-minority equation. Delhi 6 tries a little but back tracks. Mamdu keeps Hanuman and Mecca together but there is no equivalent effort on the part of the Hindus; sure they eat the prashad that the maulvi gives to them but that is as far as they go. The monkey man backdrop is complemented by an enactment of the visually dominating Ram Leela. Although located in a historically Muslim dominated area, it is mostly a Hindu world in which the story unfolds with a few Muslim characters; but for the visuals, you might have forgotten it was Chandni Chowk -- this is a privilege of the majority, and the majority identified parts of the population. Delhi 6 starts developing the idea of unequal power dynamics but slips into stereotypes. When the crisis is peaking, it is Mamdu who is seen buying the gun, it is the Muslim rioters who have access to more dangerous weapons (the moltov cocktails) while the Hindus mainly sport the sticks.

Finally, it is again the beleaguered Mamdu who shoots the firearm causing, for a minute, the only death in this otherwise comic film. I think, quite in spite of itself, the film ends up portraying Muslims as potentially more dangerous than the Hindus. The world view of the Hindus is self-contained and not heterogeneous at the beginning of the film and not much changes in it by the end of it. By holding both Hindus and Muslims equally accountable (and individual responsibility reinforces that) the film fails to hold any one accountable at all. And this is a failure not just of the film but liberal politics itself.